


With What Came After

by gogollescent



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-13
Updated: 2013-04-13
Packaged: 2017-12-08 09:32:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/759842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jules hadn’t been able to tell cats from dogs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With What Came After

Jules hadn’t been able to tell cats from dogs. His aunt had a chihuahua whose triangular ears, naked pink nose, and leaf-colored eyes aligned perfectly with the teacher’s description of a cat’s identifying features; and besides, it hated him—skittered away from his small hands to occupy a square of sunlight, or jump on his mother’s leg—while at home their dog loved him even when he was afraid. Their dog was a big Afghan hound who slinked around trailing long silky fur with an expression of incredible sorrow. There was no reason to lump him in with the twitching creature his aunt carried in her skirt like a harvest.

Julian thought that sort of thing, sometimes, before he went to sleep in his narrow station bed. He would try to reconfigure his memories until Jules was insightful, a seven-year-old poet, imbued with a level of quirky perception he no longer had access to, thanks to what his parents had done to him. He did remember some real pieces of Jules’ life: a day in Paris with his mother on business, before she’d lost her job to one of his father’s schemes, desperately clinging to her skirt until she agreed to take him with her on the shuttle, and then, slowly, relaxing his grip over the course of the afternoon—not least because one hand had been occupied with an eclair. He remembered putting his fingers in Kukalaka’s insides, the soft, white and surprisingly brilliant hairs that composed the bear’s false stuffing. Fibers had clung to his short fingernails afterwards, and frustrated, incapable of cleaning himself, he had tried to wash them off with juice. But those kinds of anecdotes barely belonged to him, it had been so long—even if he had never undergone the enhancement, they would be irretrievable now beneath a layer of decades and words, animals buried in peat. More accurately, they had been worn beyond recognition by repeated handling; reduced to compact stories that were made to fit his grip. In the end he was alone with the Jules who had come after.

He asked Ezri about it once during an early dinner; whether at the end of three hundred years, the lives of her first hosts were really memories, or just knowledge passed on and packaged by the recollections of more recent carriers. She seemed troubled, but she shook her head. “It’s not like that for Trills,” she said. “Or not for the symbionts—it’s true that there are things about my own history that no longer seem vivid. But once you’re joined, you’re trusting in a repository far more precise than your own—the symbiont keeps everything. It chooses what to offer up.”

“You make it sound so separate,” he said.

“I try,” said Ezri, dabbing at her long mouth. She had lovely lips: shapely and drooping, as removed from the neat inconspicuousness of the rest of her face as the symbiont’s genome was from hers. “It’s not standard practice, but I have to remind it who’s boss.”

“Not Curzon, or Tobin…”

“Or even Dax,” she said.

“It might not be standard practice, but Jadzia did it too,” said Julian, resting his chin on his interlocked fingers. “Except, generally, she went the other way. She talked about Jadzia like someone she’d once known, right along with Curzon and the rest. ‘Jadzia was always… Jadzia never…’”

“Sounds familiar,” said Ezri, wry but not as painstakingly gentle as she’d been in the early weeks. He muttered an apology, and she looked at him clear-eyed over her plate.

He hadn’t been quite fair, calling the rest of her boring. There was delicacy in the set of her small head on her slim neck and the light blue remove of her glance. He’d called them Jadzia’s eyes, but she possessed them now without remorse, and he was past the point where momentary similarities between separate categories disturbed his whole schema. And it was attractive. He was surely enough at peace with his fear to admit that it was attractive.

“No, I’m the one who should be apologizing—I know how strange it is, having to… put a hold on loss.” She sounded thoughtful; practiced. Must have been the talks with Worf. She stirred dinner with her fork, and Julian was reminded, sharply, of Paris, the failing light on the river as his mother and he crossed a stone bridge. Jules had dawdled when they passed the portrait artists who sold charcoal drawings on the cheap, wanting to see his own face flattened out on a page, astonished that they could be so right so quickly; but his mother had pulled him on by the hand, to the shore beyond. 

“I don’t have any illusions about what I’ve lost,” he said. “Really, I’d rather think about my gain.” 

“I told you not to flirt with me,” said Ezri, gently after all, and a little flustered, to his surprise. It wasn’t that it was difficult to fluster her, but usually she quashed it so firmly with her protestations of weakness; she let her own vulnerability go uncommented on only when she was comfortable, and it made him feel obscurely proud. He murmured, “Sorry, sorry," grinning a little into his cup. Then met her gaze.

“I do mean it, you know,” he said. “Having you here isn’t a patch on her, it’s a—a patch on you. More than a patch. Possibly a whole surgery—I'll stop. You understand, anyway.”

“Sadly, yes,” said Ezri, who by now was smiling too. “I understand you perfectly, Julian.”


End file.
